Richard Hogan: 'Midlife crisis? To me, that's midlife happiness'

Richard Hogan. Photograph Moya Nolan

Picture this for a moment; a follically challenged portly chap, sunglasses on, soft top of his Porsche 911 down and the wind flowing through the remaining scraps of a once thriving civilisation, he is smiling, singing some song he loves, off to play golf.

How do we label this happy dude? Yes, midlife crisis. But crisis, really? To me, that’s midlife happiness.

The term midlife crisis is a bit of a misnomer because buying something you love or taking up a new hobby is not a crisis, but an adventure or achieving a dream.

The midlife crisis is a very real thing. But we have to understand what constitutes a crisis and what constitutes trying something new or challenging yourself.

The search for life meaning is a universal experience across our species, the search for something other than our outwardly experience is a very common phenomenon as we age.

Let’s face it, when we are born we are given a pretty clear map towards life satisfaction; go to school, study hard, go to college, get a degree, work in a good job, get a partner, marry, buy a house, get a nice car, and at the end of that is a great treasure.

The treasure is wealth and life satisfaction. You follow this map, you reach the apex of adult life and you look around and ask, ‘Is this it?’ ‘Why do I feel empty or like I am missing something?’

Profound questions to ask yourself, and questions that require a good examination. When the outer world is no longer satisfying maybe the inner world is calling, how you answer that will make the difference between thriving in middle age or having a crisis in middle age.

In my experience, a midlife crisis occurs when there is a prolonged and deep feeling of unease, a shattering disquiet that creeps into your life and you don’t know what do to with it.

Its presence is often very muted but causes the person to live a life of silent despair. 

In a desperate attempt to suppress this despair, they utilise all sorts of maladaptive behaviours; affairs, drugs and alcohol, buying expensive items they cannot afford, taking steroids and going to the gym excessively, taking up extreme sports or reminiscing endlessly about the past.

When this silent damage creeps into your life, a crisis develops. But is it any wonder we have trouble dealing with the midlife transition?

Everywhere we are surrounded by negative imagery about ageing. There is literally a trillion-dollar industry motivated to make you feel bad for ageing.

It is, after all, anti-ageing cream, not pro-ageing cream. We are drenched in ubiquitous messages about how to stay youthful, I can’t think of anything more undesirable than how ageing is presented to us. I don’t even think death gets such a bad rap as ageing.

Just look around you, girls are taking preventative Botox in their early twenties. We try to do the impossible, and hold on to youthful looks while we age.

We are like that old king trying to keep the tide out with his spoon, and it causes us all sorts of problems, we can even jeopardise our health in that pursuit.

If we celebrated ageing rather than making people fearful of it, perhaps we would enjoy the mid-way point more. Because let’s face it, at this point in our lives we have lost people.

We know not everyone makes it past this life stage. So we need to have better thinking about it so we can celebrate the miracle that it truly is.

Of course, there are biological aspects to low dips in midlife. For women, menopause can cause all sorts of discomfort with all the hormonal changes taking place. 

Also, our parents are ageing, our children are older and rely on us less and less, we might have less intimacy in our lives, and there can be cooling in libido, these factors can cause a serious nadir in life satisfaction in our forties.

For men, testosterone decreases about 1-2% each year once they reach their forties. That can leave them fatigued, lacking motivation and feeling their best years are behind them.

We often hear the phrase, ‘it’s all downhill from now on’. But that is just a marketing ploy.

The more unsettled you are the more likely you are to buy whatever rubbish they are trying to peddle. We all feel this in middle age.

But I often think of James Campbell’s story of the ‘hero’s journey’. He saw that there was a monomyth across all mythology; the hero is living comfortably at home, he hears a calling and goes off to answer it, he experiences adversity and suffering along the way.

But when he returns to his hometown, he has gained incredible insights and knowledge.

He is a better person for taking the journey. That is the quest ahead of all of us in midlife. 

We can listen to whatever is calling us, and we can go on a remarkable journey of self-discovery or we can attempt to blot it out with maladaptive behaviours which will cause all sorts of problems for us and our loved ones.

Listen to what Carl Jung said: ‘Life begins at 40, up until then you are only doing research’.

Embrace midlife, answer the call and thrive.